I was kind of bitten by a sort of zombie a bit before noon.  A complex metaphorical zombie, not the horrendous sort.  It’s the day before her 83^rd birthday.  We lived together for a decade when we were both young and I was very immature.

It confused me for a bit.  For many reasons; it always does.

I thought zombies couldn’t tolerate the light then remembered that that was vampires, but that was before 100% sun screen. I’m a fan of Christopher Moore but zombiepinups.com does not turn me on, not even a little, so, I’m a bit disconcerted.

OK, … I’m speaking figuratively but a surprise revelation about the perceptions of someone in my past, someone important I’d long treasured, felt like the bite of a zombie, … cold and unclean and perverted.  And it made me reflect and wonder how accurate my own perceptions are, recalling what a young partner once taught me: that we all seek self-justification and that to expect otherwise leads only to surprise, and not the good kind.  I’m surprised, … and not the good kind.  More the fool I.

Of course, that virtual zombie bite did clear up important mysteries and it may be shedding light on others, things I’d somehow suspected.  Sad and bitter experiences that nonetheless molded me in positive directions, making the real world clear to me, lifting the veil of delusions that I and too many of my generation lived by.

I feel as though I’m shrouded in cold damp mists, the kind that in the predawn twilight terrify in dirty city allies but bring hope in the crags and crevices that dot the crests of mountains in the evergreen Andes.  As though I’m waking from a restless slumber and looking for the perfect lover whose kiss may or may not have finally found me (for the record, I think it has).

Or perhaps I’m just dreaming that I’ve woken.  Or as I sometimes suspect, perhaps we are all the dreams of the primal lifeform, probably a prokaryote, nightmares of what may be should it survive.

_______

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2014; all rights reserved.  Revisited and revised on July 30, 2026, in an anticipation of a birthday about to arrive.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.